Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
> That's right, but it doesn't help any of us anything. The
> costs of defending against a patent claim (even if the claim
> can eventually be overturned) are much to high to bear for
> anybody, but major corporations. In other words, it doesn't
> matter if you are right or wrong if you can't pay the legal
> bill. This is not just theory as a fair number of mobile app
> developer recently found out:
>>http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/05/lodsys-sues-7-app-developers-in-eastern.html
Yep, patents are a bitch for small independant developers stuck
between Apple's onerous AppStore conditions and patent trolls
like Lodsys.
However, for open source projects like GHC, there are a number
of organisations like the Software Freedom Law Center:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
that provide (at least some) patent defense for open source
projects.
Its also possible for open source projects to 'design around'
patent issues. For instance there was a patent on the VFAT
file format implementaion in the Linux kernel that was avoided
by careful reading of the patent and working around the patents
specifics:
http://lwn.net/Articles/338981/
Erik
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/